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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 12, 2015

Jazz, by the numbers

March 12, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Six years ago I wrote a Wall Street Journal column called “Can Jazz Be Saved?” that was misread, misunderstood, misquoted, and dismissed by large numbers of shortsighted musicians who were determined not to face the facts.

jazzfuneral1Contrary to widespread popular belief, I didn’t say anywhere in that column that jazz is dead. This is what I really said:

It’s no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak.

The bad news came from the National Endowment for the Arts’ latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the fourth to be conducted by the NEA (in participation with the U.S. Census Bureau) since 1982. These are the findings that made jazz musicians sit up and take notice:

• In 2002, the year of the last survey, 10.8% of adult Americans attended at least one jazz performance. In 2008, that figure fell to 7.8%.

• Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it’s growing older—fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29.

• Older people are also much less likely to attend jazz performances today than they were a few years ago. The percentage of Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 9.8%. In 2002, it was 13.9%. That’s a 30% drop in attendance….

What I find no less revealing, though, is that the median age of the jazz audience is now comparable to the ages for attendees of live performances of classical music (49 in 2008 vs. 40 in 1982), opera (48 in 2008 vs. 43 in 1982), nonmusical plays (47 in 2008 vs. 39 in 1982) and ballet (46 in 2008 vs. 37 in 1982). In 1982, by contrast, jazz fans were much younger than their high-culture counterparts.

What does this tell us? I suspect it means, among other things, that the average American now sees jazz as a form of high art. Nor should this come as a surprise to anyone, since most of the jazz musicians that I know feel pretty much the same way. They regard themselves as artists, not entertainers, masters of a musical language that is comparable in seriousness to classical music—and just as off-putting to pop-loving listeners who have no more use for Wynton Marsalis than they do for Felix Mendelssohn….

I stopped responding long ago to people who complained about my column without having read it (a category that all too obviously encompassed a considerable number of the people who wrote about it at the time). Now, though, comes a new set of numbers reported earlier this week in The Jazz Line under the headline “Jazz Has Become the Least-Popular Genre in the U.S.” that I feel obliged to share:

According to Nielsen’s 2014 Year-End Report, jazz is continuing to fall out of favor with American listeners and has tied with classical music as the least-consumed music in the U.S., after children’s music.

Both jazz and classical represent just 1.4% of total U.S. music consumption apiece. However, classical album sales were higher for 2014, which puts jazz at the bottom of the barrel.

This continues an alarming trend that has seen more and more listeners move away from jazz every year.

Album sales have long been a key measure of the popularity of individual genres, and year after year jazz album sales continue to fall.

In 2011, a total of 11 million jazz albums (CD, cassette, vinyl, & digital) were sold, according to BusinessWeek. This represents 2.8% of all music sold in that year. However, just a year later, in 2012, that percentage fell to 2.2%. It rose slightly to 2.3% in 2013 before falling once again to just 2% in 2014.

That 2% represents just 5.2 million albums sold by all jazz artists in 2014. In comparison, the best-selling artist of 2014, Taylor Swift, sold 3.7 million copies of her latest album, 1989, in the last 2 months of 2014 alone.

ostrich-head-in-sandBelieve me, I’m not happy to pass on these latest numbers. I didn’t want to be right back in 2009, either. But I was—and I am.

I had no quick-fix recipes to offer six years ago. Instead, I concluded “Can Jazz Be Saved?” by suggesting that if Americans really were coming to see jazz as an art music, then jazz musicians needed to do what a growing number of forward-looking classical musicians and administrators were finally starting to do:

Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they should like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle. If you’re marketing Schubert and Stravinsky to those listeners, you have no choice but to start from scratch and make the case for the beauty of their music to otherwise intelligent people who simply don’t take it for granted. By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners—not next month, not next week, but right now.

For the most part, they didn’t—and the results of their refusal to face the facts are now painfully clear.

UPDATE: If you think I’m saying that contemporary jazz is not creatively vital, you didn’t read what I wrote.

So you want to see a show?

March 12, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• It’s Only a Play (comedy, PG-13/R, closes June 7, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (historical musical, PG-13, closes May 3, moves to Broadway Aug. 6, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Both Your Houses (political satire, G/PG-13, closes Apr. 12, reviewed here)
• The Matchmaker (romantic farce, G, closes Apr. 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Between Riverside and Crazy (drama, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes Mar. 22, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, some performances sold out last week, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)

Primary Stages - Lives of the SaintsCLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Lives of the Saints (six one-act comedies, PG-13/R, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ORLANDO, FLA.:
• Henry V (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Mar. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN VERO BEACH, FLA.:
• West Side Story (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Iceman Cometh (drama, PG-13, remounting of Chicago production, original production reviewed here)

Almanac: V.S. Naipaul on peace

March 12, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well–you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill to be well again had seemed everything.”

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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